When I first found out about loving someone else I was 5 (or at least it's the earliest memory of love I can remember), and it was by watching a Disney movie. This wasn't the kind of love that your parents had for you. The kind that made you feel warm and safe in your mother's arms. It was the kind of love that made you want to believe in something as silly as Ariel giving her voice up for a guy she knew, without a single doubt, that he was her soulmate.
In this moment I was amazed that something so amazing existed. I believed for a good portion of my adolescent years that love was something that could and would never hurt you. That was until I saw my first heartbreak. I was 7, and my sister came home crying, because of something he had said. I knew that it couldn't have been the love that I knew. It had to had been something else, or so I thought.
I wanted to believe that that would never happen to me. My soulmate would never dare break my heart or turn it to stone. That is, until I met you, and until you did.
I was 15 when I first met you. You were something out of a big ol' story book that sat beside my bed and I loved it. I thrived in the idea of you being the one I was waiting for, and you seemed to be thinking the same when you came to talk to me. I was just a girl with a big heart and an even bigger imagination. You were a boy with stars in his eyes and a dream that shot out of your hands; into the sky. A dream that would come to be more important than me.
That same year, when I turned 16, you told me you loved me, and I believed you. It was the last Sunday in October and we were swinging at that one park in Dakota City. The sky was a light purple and you could see the diamonds in the water laid out on the Missouri River. I was trying to swing around the whole world and fell on the ground. You jumped off your swing and asked me if I was okay, the sincerity in your eyes killed me.
"are you okay," you said, "Don't do that again."
"Why," I said, "It doesn't matter if I get hurt."
"It does to me. I love you, idiot."
Love smelled like an old baseball mitt and a big cup of sun tea that your mom made for me whenever I was over. I never thought anything could smell better than that. Better than you. It felt like you holding me in your arms, knowing damn well that I was a sad girl but not caring that I was so; it looked like blue eyes looking into my own brown eyed well, pulling me out.
When you left I was 18, and I understood, but it didn't stop from hurting as much as it did. I know that your eyes were set on your dreams, and I wasn't enough to stop you from leaving. I never stopped loving you, and It hurt like hell, but I know it was for the best. You wanted to play Baseball in Maine, and my dreams were on the west coast.
To be completely honest, I don't know a whole lot about love. The thing that I do know is that someday my Prince or Princess will come, and they will not be as perfect as I thought they would be. They will have cracks and holes in their hearts that someone else left, and so will I, but we will try to fill them as well as we can. That's all that you can do for someone you love.
